The “Break it Down” Blog

Introduction

I started my quest for a good Windows XP alternative (before Vista ships) with SUSE 10.1 RC3 preview as I outlined in a 2 part review here and here. I realized during that review that reviewing something for a day worth of use isn’t that handy and if I don’t force myself to use the OS for atleast a week straight to do my normal day to day work, I won’t know if I really can use it or not. There just aren’t things you get around to doing unless you are using an OS for your primary desktop. Some of these things that I identified as items I don’t do unless I am using a computer as my primary OS are:

• Get video playback work

• This means all video file formats that I can play on windows
• Streaming video from sites like GameSpot or GameTrailers
• Flash streaming video like YouTube

I think that covers most of the “primary operating system” use cases that I need to get working before I feel settled into an OS. I am in the process of installing SUSE 10.1 final release right now to give it a week, but this review will focus on my last week I’ve spent with Ubuntu 6.06 64-bit. To recap, my hardware setup is as follows:

• AMD 4800 X2
• ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
• 4GB Ram
• nVidia 7800 GTX
• 3x Seagate 250GB 7200.9

The 4GB of ram is my only reason for using 64-bit builds of my operating systems. Even though my chip is 64-bit, there are enough “gotchas” with 64-bit builds (or lack there of) of software that I and everyone else use that I would happily run a 32-bit operating system if it didn’t cost me 1/2 my ram. More on that later.

Background

I’m primarily a Windows XP user. I’ve been using Linux since RedHat 5.0 release and have used everything from RedHat, to Gentoo for 2 years, to Ubuntu to Fedora to SUSE; never really finding a perfect match. I recently got a Mac laptop as well to roll into the mix. My goals are to find an operating system to replace Windows XP that has all the “works out of the box” experience I have with Windows not because Windows is technically superior, but because everyone supports it. Things “just working” counts for a lot. Now that I’ve gotten older and don’t enjoy tinkering as much and just want to get work done, spending 30mins getting sound working to review a podcast or 5mins figuring out the best PDF viewing for Gnome on linux is a waste of my time. I don’t mind installing things from a repository to get an unsupported file working (like say playing DVDs), what I don’t want to do is spend hours reading mailing lists trying to make sure I have the right version of mplayer with the CVS snapshot of the plugins because totem doesn’t use the right god-knows-what and I’m left not watching my DVD. I don’t care how technically advanced Linux or Mac is over Windows, what my focus is gunning for is things working out of the box. I want to use my software and get my work done.

Installation

The installation of Ubuntu 6.06 went very smoothly. It’s a simple install process, not as many choices as the SUSE 10.1 install that I outlined in Part 1 of my SUSE review, but a little more stream lined and easy to follow. Most all my hardware was detected appropriately and I performed the install from the desktop of the LiveCD as is intended.

Everyday Use

Out of the box Ubuntu, and my guess, most other Linux operating systems give the presentation that they are pretty much drop-in replacements for typical office machines. They come preinstalled with OpenOffice, Evolution and Firefox which cover about 85% of my computer use right there. It’s that last 15% that was a goddamn nightmare to get working.

* Evolution (email, groupware)

First let me review Evolution. This software, as an email client, is in no way a replacement for Thunderbird. If what you need is email do not waste your time with Evolution. The junk mail filtering doesn’t work at all although I read in a mailing list this morning that you have to install spam assasin locally to get it to work. Awesome how it mentions nothing about this and simply fails. I also noticed I cannot turn junk mail filtering on for my POP account, those controls are only available for my IMAP accounts. Don’t know if that is a bug, but it’s wasting my time. Not to mention the fantastic use of filters that are only applicable to incomming mail and cannot be run against a folder. So as you develop filters or work on older accounts you cannot apply those filters to your folders, wow that’s helpful. Let me also address my exported Gmail contact list that gave me autocomplete for a day, then stopped working until I had typed out almost the entire name, then stopped working completely (without touching the address book). When I view my contacts from the contacts bar on the left, I have 100s of them. From my To:, CC: or BCC: menus I have 20 listed with no scroll bar to see more. That’s cute, more time wasted and no more autocomplete.

Then there are little things like having no control over the order of quoted or replied to messages with regards to positioning your signature. This is a very specific feature but something Thunderbird has supported for a while. Not something that you realize you need/want until you have it.
I’m going stop right there because you get the point. If you don’t need the groupware integration that Evolution offers, use Thunderbird. There is no comparison in the functionality of these two products. I cannot speak to quality as Evolution seems mostly fine and I only had it crash on startup for me twice where it would just hang it’s process not letting another version startup so I had to kill all of it’s processes before starting it. I also think there is more support culminating behind Thunderbird, so overtime I see Novell putting a limited life span on Evolution and just adopting Thunderbird.

* Firefox (web browsing)

Nothing to report here. Firefox is a great browser. It works fine, it’s plugins work fine. My complaint here came from when I tried to get Flash installed. There is no 64-bit build of the commercial Flash plugin so I tried to install libflash which is an absolute joke. I was unable to get any Flash software working with it all the way back to Flash 5. I also noticed visiting Anandtech caused Firefox to crash which was a nice touch, forget that. I uninstalled it.

* GAIM (instant messaging)

Great IM client. I actually prefer this client on all the platforms I use (Windows and Linux, and Adium on Mac which uses GAIM libraries). They have done a great job with this client, I don’t know how Kopete stacks up but GAIM get’s the job done. File transfers are improved in the 2.0 betas that are out, but Ubuntu is still shipping 1.5 since it’s the stable release. No biggie, I’m not doing a lot of file transfers.

* Office Work (open office, image editing)

OpenOffice and GIMP are great, always have been. Not much to review here, the OpenOffice integration is top notch, it even looks like a Gnome app and using settings from inside of it like the quickstart launcher work as advertised. GIMP works as it always has, great app with lots of features.

* Audio/Video (playing music, playing movies)

Playing music, not hard. Following the Restricted Formats guide from Ubuntu gets you music working pretty fast, even AAC files from your iPod (not the iPod itself, that’s to come).

As far as movie playing goes, excuse my asteriks that what an absolutely f**king stupid nightmare. Video codecs on Linux is like giving yourself a root canal. They exist and you will eventually end up with a setup that can play real movies, not the sample ones provided in Ogg format. I mean real ones, the ones you download from trailer sites, the ones your friends send to you in emails or the TV shows you get from torrents. The instructions from the Restricted Formats guide will not play any of these “real” videos in my experience and let me save you some effort here: use MPlayer. I know, Totem is awesome, gstreamer is fantastic… no, it’s not. Just stop trying, use MPlayer. It’s the only way you are going to get everything working. I spend 3 days trying to get my videos working using Totem and was met with either no video with audio, or skipping video and audio or lockups. Not to mention that the Mozilla/Firefox plugin doesn’t work at all and forget about watching things online like Apple Movie Trailers. Once I gave up on Totem and gstreamer and just installed MPlayer, with it’s Mozilla plugin and the essential codec pack into /usr/local/lib/win32 everything miracuously started working.

I really can’t explain how damn frustrating this process was, I was completely ready to move back to Windows for this alone. It’s not that I watch movies all the time, but the few times I grab a South Park episode or want to watch a bloopers video that someone sent me, I want to see it damnit. Ignore the fact that I still can’t watch the YouTube links everyone is sending me because of the no-64-bit-flash-build crap, this was the straw that was breaking the camel’s back. All the text I was reading gave this wonderful view of how Totem and Gstreamer were finally up to par (I fought this same battle years ago, settling on mplayer that time too). That’s a complete lie, they are not. The unfortunate thing is that Totem fits so nicely into the Gnome desktop and MPlayer’s GTK GUI was absolutely developed by coders, not UI folks. It sucks, but it works.

Another fun little thing I was running into during this process was that something I was doing while trying to get playback working with Totem or gstreamer was killing the ESD process. I don’t mean killing it like stopping it, I mean killing it so it couldn’t play sounds anymore. So I would try and play a movie, then all sound would die from all applications. I had to restart (CTRL-ALT-Backspace) to get sound back each time. That’s a fantasticly fun thing to deal with when I’m trying to find a desktop replacement “that just works”. When I started using MPlayer that issue stopped playing thank god.

* Software Development (Java, Eclipse, NetBeans, application servers, etc.)

As always Linux shines in this regard. As a development platform for seemingly anything it feels good. Performance is great, even with Swing/SWT apps now, and documentation for Unix-based systems is abundent. Using ReiserFS I mostly notice things with Java like tons of tiny file access (Javadoc, class files, Java files, etc.) are much faster than NTFS. If I remember from the haydays of ReiserFS back in Gentoo I think this was one of it’s strengths, fast handling of very small files. Anyway, it seems to be true.

* System Tools (package management, samba, config, menus, etc.)

Excellent. The system tools that the Ubuntu group has created are quite good and have a nice touch to them. The other ones that come with Gnome are fine, very simple, but fine. As I mentioned in my SUSE review, I miss the really config and hardware-specific wizards that SUSE adds for things like getting dual head working or XGL working. On Ubuntu you have to fend for yourself and dig into the config files. I did notice, with resources like Ubuntuguide.org, that adding features or editing things from the command line become an excercise in copy and paste these guides are so damn detailed. You don’t even have to think anymore, so that’s not too bad.

I did setup a Samba share last night to my Mac to stream across some videos and that was a pain in the ass to get working. In theory (and the way it’s presented from the Ubuntu desktop) is super simple. Right click and share the folder, but that didn’t work. After digging through Samba docs and about an hour later I had added my user to the smbusers file and giving proper permissions then all the sudden when I browsed my Linux machine from my Mac I was seeing the files I wanted. So out of the box it looks like it will work, but for me it didn’t.

* Hardware (video card, mouse, etc.)

I couldn’t get XGL working because I have a dual-head setup and I will wait for GTK 2.10 and Gnome 2.16 which is supposidly adding compositing, alpha blending and other features that compiz does right now giving you a little more options when using the OpenGL accelerated desktops.

Getting OpenGL working is fairly straight forward. Just adding the right repositories and installing the nVidia driver then telling X to use it in the xorg.conf file. Getting twin view (dual head for nVidia) working was a little more crappy. You have to use special options sent to the nVidia driver specifying “metamodes” which tell it to treat you two monitors as one huge desktop. Nothing impossible, just time consuming. I would prefer a GUI to do this and find it far from impossible to create one, I just doubt anyone in the open source community wants to do it which is why there likely isn’t one except from Novell.

I didn’t even bother trying to get my extra mouse buttons working. I have a Logitec MX 1000 that not only has the side buttons but has the left/right click action on the wheel as well. I made the mistake of trying to get this working about 6 months ago in Ubuntu 5.04 and it was a joke. The amount of work necessary to add mapping commands to the events generated from that hardware device and then map them to actions in applications is a nightmare IMO. It’s not impossible and a lot of people in the forums are doing it, but it is not worth the work. It’s these type of retarded things that should be automated or GUI-i-mated that never are. They weren’t 4 years ago when I needed it in Gentoo and they aren’t now and likely never will until a commercial company with a monitary incentive to do this work steps up and does it.

* iPod Integration

I made this a section of it’s own because a lot of you have iPods. Well let me sum this up for you, out of the box it sucks. I’ll also sum up for you that once you have everything installed, it sucks. First off you are going to be using Amarok as it just added support for syncing with your iPod, so that’s a KDE app on your Gnome desktop. Sweet. What about gtkpod you say? Sure you can use that, also know that it will corrupt your iTunes DB so if you keep using your iPod with iTunes on your Windows desktop, at some point you will get a notice about a failed or corrupted iTunes DB. Rock on!

The misleading part is that if your iPod is connected to your computer when Ubuntu is on, it pops up this nice looking iPod icon on your desktop and shows it to you. Giving you the impression that everything works and all is right with the world. Well if read-only access is all you need, then everything is all right with the world. If you plan to sync music or iPods, good luck with that. I wouldn’t encourage you to if you have important things on your iPod. Also don’t expect to be playing your purchased music, those encrypted AAC files cannot be played on Linux.

General Tips

Do not use 64-bit builds of these operating systems. If you can avoid using the 64-bit builds of these OS’s avoid it. There are too many damn gotchas when you go to set things up that make you regret it later. Like not getting Flash working because there is no 64-bit build of it, or having to install the 64-bit builds of the JDK (which isn’t so bad) and Eclipse (which isn’t as tested). You will notice as you read through some of the tutorials on how to get things working that some of the packages referenced (especially from restricted repositories) are not in the 64-bit repositories so you are left fending for yourself if you want to get those items working. Whenever you run into prolems in software like hangups or crashes you are never sure if it’s you or the build that just hasn’t been exercised enough. Like I said, I’m trying to get work done, not be awesome. I don’t care if it’s a 12-bit build, if it runs reasonably fast and works that’s what I want.

Overall Impressions

So after a week of solid work and play with Ubuntu 6.06 I can say it is not a replacement for my Windows XP desktop. If hardware setup had been as easy as SUSE, excluding my mouse buttons (I can deal with that) and audio/video had worked, I would say it’s feasible. The audio/video issue will never likely resolve itself as there are license problems there. So if you do like to watch the occasional video, or listen to music from your iPod and don’t mind screwing around installing mplayer then installing it’s essential codec pack manually you’ll likely be fine, but it will be a process. It’s not plug and play by any stretch of the imagination. Also for newer versions of codecs you can expect video and audio screw ups or hickups during playback.

Please keep in mind that this score is based on “Can I replace Windows XP with this”, this score is not relative to other Linux distributions. I’m also not rating potential functionality or absolute attainable functionality, I’m raiting functionality that is achieved with a Windows-level of work, not screwing around with DBUS event mappings and the like to get my mouse working.
Score:

• Applications: 8/10
• Audio/Visual: 6/10 (Troublesome for ‘real’ media)
• Office/Communication: 9/10
• Hardware/Setup: 5/10 (All manual)
• Device Support: 6/10 (Mostly read only)
• Overall: 6.5/10
• Switch? No.
• Comment: I had a constant low level of frustration. Every day I was met with something new that pissed me off. Just recently (after all the hardware problems) it was having keyboard input lockup and copy-paste operations fail or paste old information from the incorrect copy buffer. Needlessly frustrating and exceedingly stupid.

That’s my assessment of Ubuntu 6.06 after spending a week with it as my primary desktop. For those of you that are on Ubuntu and love it, let me know if I missed some big tips here on how to get my problems working easily. That’s sort of the key. Saying “all my buttons on my mouse work jerk!” doesn’t help me, because I can guaruntee you that you didn’t fire up a UI to callibrate it or even add a single line to your xorg.conf file to get it working. You had to follow a guide, create multiple config files and adjust preferences for each application (based on process) to get it working. Those are not the things I want to spend my time doing and other distrobutions like SUSE are doing work to alleviate that pain, so it is possible.

Keep your eyes peeled, in about 2 weeks time I should have a long term review of SUSE 10.1 up as well. (Digg this)

* Update 1: This review sounds a little SUSE-is-the-best heavy, sorry for that tone, it’s unintentional. It just happens that I had SUSE on the brain when writing this as it is the next Linux desktop test.

* Update 2: As I just discovered, openSUSE is not the same as SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), which is the version I wanted to review and I review in my initial RC3 review. openSUSE is a very bad/complicated looking version of Gnome with all the default feel of Gnome plus YaST2. All the cool portions of SLED that people talked about in their reviews (Computer panel, easy XGL support, hardware setup etc.) are not in openSUSE, that are value-add stuff in the commercial SLED distrobution. Unfortunately I found this out after a 3GB download an an hour install… woops. I’m burning the 60-day trial of SLED right now ($50/year) and will review that. I’m also grabbing the 32-bit version to avoid further issues with 64-bit builds (If you read my review of RC3 I had a lot of XGL lockups, I’m hoping this remedies that and I can give a more indepth review of all the bells and whistles turned on).

* Update 3: It seems I was a bit harsh on Evolution in this review. I now have SLED 10.1 installed and am using Evolution again and one of the commenters mentioned that you need to select your mail to apply filters or Junk checks to it. Now that I’m doing that it’s working a little more smoothly. I do stand by the original assessment that Thunderbird is a better/more functional client, I’m just saying Junk filtering and filters in general aren’t completely borked as I originally thought they were.

* Update 4: Aparently I missed two solutions to installing unorthodox software (like the audio and video codecs) that make the process incredibly simple: Automatix and EasyUbuntu. I’m not sure how these two solutions stack up against each other (or compliment each other). I did notice that EasyUbuntu has a nice GTK GUI:

* Update 5: I reinstalled Ubuntu 6.06 and after running through the 130 updates from the update manager then restarting, I installed and ran EasyUbuntu… all of my audio and video work, even video that didn’t work before when I manually fought through the codec battle. I was playing WMV movies that barely play on Windows in Totem/Gstreamer without any problem. I also went to Apple/Trailers and watched them embedded in my browser with no problems either. I retract what I said about Totem/Gstreamer. It seems using MPlayer is not necessary, it’s just that the installation process of getting “Real” codecs installed for Totem/Gstreamer to work right is a rediculous PIA (unless you are using one of these plug-and-play scripts to do it for you). I do have to say I was amazed at how many files (codecs) EasyUbuntu pulled down in order to get all the movies playing right, someone should get shot for that.

* Update 6: American McGee, famed game designer has just switched to Ubuntu as well.